The present invention relates to needles for knitting machines, especially for circular knitting machines.
Knitting needles are placed with their backs contacting the needle beds of the needle grooves in a cylinder of a circular knitting machine. The knitting needles rotate at a high speed as the cylinder rotates, and, at the same time, the needle butts perform high-speed reciprocating movement as they are activated by cams in fixed cam holders that are so arranged to face the needle butts.
As the knitting speed becomes faster, the force applied by the cam to the butt becomes larger, which force is transmitted to the needle head in shock waves, causing damage to the needle head. To solve this problem, it is known to be effective to provide cutouts on the needle body that is between the butt and the needle head alternately from the upper side and the lower side, which gives the entire needle a meander-form by forming bridges therein (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 61-239065). It is also known to be effective to make the width of the meander-form stem as narrow as possible. (In this specification and claims, "width" of a needle part means vertical height of the needle part when placed as in the accompanying drawings.)
However, by making the stem narrow, there sometimes occurred damage to the needle body at a bridge portion near the butt, presumably because of the concentration of stress at such a place, where the needle body suddenly becomes narrow.